Teleidoscope

Sat, Oct 10, 2009

Terra preta

Posted at 12:46 am MDT to Garden

There are patches of rich soil (often 2 meters deep) throughout the Amazon basin that were created a few thousand years ago by people. These are called terra preta. (Like the Mississippi valley, the Amazon was densrly populated by argicultural socities before the Old World epidemics swept through.)

A major ingredient in creating these patches of soil is charcoal generated by slow burning of trees and plants and then soaked with organic liquids. There are fungi and special earthworms in the Amazon that get into the act and make the fertile soil patches self-sustaining against anything but the most intensive agriculture.

I don't know if this will work in dry temperate zone soils but it might be interesting to look into it. Googling provides pointers that may be interesting and useful -- most of the information above was abstracted from wikipedia, but the article is very citation-heavy.

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Sun, Aug 09, 2009

Trimmer Line and Shop-Vac

Posted at 3:56 pm MDT to Garden

I've remembered another reason I haven't used my string-trimmer lawn mower much in recent years. It is amazingly hard to find 155 mil string trimmer line locally. The smaller gauge stuff I tried isn't going to cut it (literally).

Even McGuckins failed me, which is a little annoying since they sold me the trimmer mower (years ago, granted, but it's still annoying.

I'll swing by Earl's Saw Shop before work tomorrow and see if they have some in stock. If not, I need to order some other stuff from Amazon so I can get free shipping... otherwise, the shipping will cost as much as the string.

I got a new garden hose to replace the ripped one, and a nozzle-repair thingy for the hose with the squashed nozzle. So now I have two usable hoses.

The truck is cleared out, and ready to be traded in tomorrow.

While I was at Lowe's getting garden hose stuff and the new gas can for the mower, I also picked up a new 12 gallon Shop-Vac for the basement. The old one (an 8 gallon model taller than the new 12 gallon one) is about 20 years old and really won't deal with the dust and grit very well anymore. And the new one has a drain plug for wet mode! No more tipping over the big cannister of sludgy water to empty it down the floor drain. Modern filters for both wet and dry modes are better, too.

The Forrester has a fair amount of cargo space, especially with the back seats folded down, but the box for the Shop-Vac is pretty large. I decided I might as well take advantage of the truck's volume while I still have it available. And I really need to bring the basement to more presentable state.

With the wet/dry vac (and new, working garden hoses) I'll be able to vacuum up the loose dirt in dry mode, then wash the cement floor and suck up the dirty water in wet mode. And once the new doors are installed the basement will be more weather-tight and should accumulate less dust going forward. The lack of new avalanches (because of the beautiful new retaining wall) will help too.

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Sat, Aug 08, 2009

Costco Books

Posted at 9:52 pm MDT to Garden

The books department at Costco usually has a fairly banal mix of books in the fiction section, but they sometimes have interesting cookbooks and special collections at very good prices: not long ago I got the new edition of "How to Cook Eveything in hardcover (which is a HUGE book) for less than 20 dollars. I was able to get the Complete Far Side for my brother one year for Christmas at a fair proce, too. And the Complete Calvin and Hobbes for myself.

Their garden books are excellent, too, and very well localized to the individual stores, which is impressive for a big warehouse operation like Costco.

Books I have acquired at the local Costco in the past: Rocky Mountain Gardener's Guide and Xeriscape Colorado: The Complete Guide.

Most recently they have had copies of Durable Plants for the Garden by Colorado State University, the Denver Botanic Garden and Green Industries of Colorado.

If I ever get my deck, grading and hardscape work completed to a point where I can start planting, these three books should be very helpful. And in the meantime, they are full of beautiful photos of plants and gardens to admire.

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Mon, Aug 03, 2009

Tomatoes

Posted at 11:27 pm MDT to Garden

I bought a small tomato plant at the farmers' market on Saturday.

It isn't actually in the ground yet. The planter box is assembled and filled with dirt, but I need to soak the planting mix once more, thoroughly, before i put the plants into the squares. And the ones that came out of green houses need another days of partial sun before they move out into full sun conditions. I may actually plant things tomorrow.

But I have eaten three golf-ball-sized vine-ripened tomatoes from my very own tomato plant.

Other plants waiting to go into the square foot garden include:

sage
rosemary
marjoram
oregano
portulacas
chrysanthemum
marigold
summer squash (already flowering, like the tomato plant)
iceplant (a flowering ground-cover)

I also have garlic cloves to plant, and seeds for fall crops of carrots and parsley, and thyme. And Nanette has promised me some pea seeds (which she buys by the pound) and onion starts.

Besides the grapevine...

Some of these plants will move into other beds, once I have other beds to move them to. In the mean time, it's nice to have some herbs and flowers.

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Sat, Aug 01, 2009

Labyrinth

Posted at 6:44 am MDT to Garden

I have been trying to decide what I am going to do about the area of my front lawn that was scraped bare by the bozos who did the digging for the power-line burial last year.

I really want something there other than weeds. (I'm amazed that bare spot has grown so many weeds this year -- some of them must need very little organic matter in their soil, just minerals and water.) But I don't really want a lawn, especially not one that I would need to inflict my horrible well water on.

I was looking at a website about xeriscape ground-covers which cautioned against mono-cropping them in imitation of a lawn, and something in my memory went "ping".

I could do a xeriscape meditation labyrinth! I have wanted a labyrinth for years, and now I have a good spot for one. If I'm going to put money and effort into the yard, it might as well be for things I want.

I went to the Labyrinth Company website, which sells (among other products for building labyrinths) weed cloth preprinted in labyrinth patterns to use when laying a labyrinth out in your garden. I ordered the pattern for my favorite labyrinth, an octagonal 5-row model that harmonizes well with the Net of Mirrors symbolic system.

I'll do the paths in gravel and the boundaries in river rock and xeric ground covers. And I can put a flagstone in the center, and elemental symbols in the 4 corners outside the octagon, to make it an even better ritual space.

It probably won't really be set up until sometime next year, but I need the pattern now, so I can lay out the over-all landscape design. (I am terrible at visualizing things like this.)

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Thu, Jul 30, 2009

Vermiculite

Posted at 10:34 pm MDT to Garden

I have the final ingredient I needed to set up my first square foot garden bed: Nanette had a partial sack of coarse vermiculite she was able to let me have. And we are putting in a combined order to her supplier: fine vermiculite for her seedlings and coarse for my garden beds. So by the time enough of the heavy landscape construction is done and I can create the planting beds I want, I should have the materials available.

One nice thing about having a friend with an organic farm is that Nanette knows sources for things you can't get at ordinary garden centers. I don't understand why the garden centers don't supply vermiculite in other than tiny quantities.

I also received a new seed catalog in the mail today, from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Looking at seed catalogs is a good activity for a cold damp evening. It's just that usually the cold damp evening is in March or April, not July. The Denver Airport recorded a record low high temperature today, breaking a record from sometime in the 1920s.

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Sun, Jul 26, 2009

Shane

Posted at 7:58 pm MDT to Garden

My business partner's son came over for a few hours and worked on the yard with me. I paid very well because i was very pleased with the progress we made.

My little dumpster is full and the yard and front porch and basement (and dining room) are bit tidier than they have been before. The firewood racks are full of firewood. And preparations have begun for a number of different projects.

There is a metal plaque with the house number at the foot of the driveway now. White with brass letters. It is currently held onto steel stakes with cable ties. If those break, I'll check my electronics supplies for insulated copper wire: I think I've got a spool of something fairly stiff.

The back of the truck has been emptied out, and the lawnmower (actually a sort of weedwacker on wheels) is in the truck ready to be taken to the repair sho tomorrow (It's been a few years since I used it, and I'm sure it needs to be oiled and lubed and tuned up before I try using it again.

The front porch has been tidied and organized, though there are currently bales of peat moss and sacks of compost piled neatly on it, ready for the squarefoot garden and other planting beds I am planning. I need to order some serious quantities of vermiculite before I can assemble things, though. I'll try to do that tomorrow.

The dead waterbed mattress is in the dumpster and will soon be out of my life. So are the steel pipes that were a swingset on the property sometime before I bought it in 1985. And a number of other objects that have been cluttering up the yard and basemnet for a very long time.

The aquarium that has been taking up space in the dining room even though it hasn't actually contained any fish since 2002 has also met its fate, though I'm storing the aquarium stand and most of the associated equipment in the basement. The dining room looks much larger. I think I'm going to enjoy the space for a while, then get my keyboard out of the pantry, where it has been making a nuisance of itself since I got back from Boston in December 2006, and set it up in a playable configuration.

The half-barrel that has been waiting to be possibly made into a fountain since I started travelling in 2002 has been moved to a new and better location to potentially be a fountain in. The liner is fine, but the barrel itself is very weathered. I noticed when we were buying peat and compost at Lowes that they have half barrels for less than $30. If/when I finally create the fountain, I will get a fresh barrel to use, but the existing one is helpful for designing layouts.

Also, a 24 inch round cement stepping stone that was in the front yard has been moved to the back, where I can use it in building a platform for the rain barrel.

Once the lawnmower/weedwacker is back in service, this place will begin to look shocklingly civilized.

I still need to figure out what to do about the three dead commercial compost bins. And what to do about an active compost bin that will be functional and survive the wind and UV here. I think I need to get some steel fenceposts and seriously anchor whatever bin I get or build next. My Mom's compost pile had stone walls -- in that part of New England you build walls with the stones that come out of the place you want to put plants, to get the stones out of the way. The stones here are not useful for wall building.

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Fri, Jul 24, 2009

Projects

Posted at 10:30 pm MDT to Garden

Wednesday evening Jason from the New Creation Hardscapes company came by to pick up the final check for the retaining wall work and discuss future projects. He's going to provide some estimates some time next week, but it looks like things will be more expensive than I had hoped. I am so used to this place that I long ago stopped noticing how badly it is graded.

Jason stopped by this morning to pick up some of the materials that were left over from the retaining wall project. I suggested window wells as a partial solution to some of the grading problems on the east side of the house, and he agreed that they would be useful. The problem is that the bottoms of the basement windows are too low to allow the dirt ro slope away frm the house properly. Windows wells will allow the grade to be higher than the bottoms of the window frames.

Also on Wednesday evening, a salesman from Lasting Impressions come by. Their company redid all of my windows on the main level in 1996, working around various problems of the original perversely designed windows, and I have been very pleased with both the work and the windows. The current project is to rebuild the bedroom deck and replace the sliding patio door that goes from the bedroom to the deck and the French door that opens from the basement to the area that is now made usable by the new retaining walls.

Ross looked at the existing deck and said, "You realize this design is totally illegal, don't you?"

I hadn't, exactly, but I wasn't surprised. The windows that were replaced in 1996 cannot possibly have been to code... Two of the bedrooms had single windows that were 4 feet wide by 8 feet tall, extending from floor to ceiling without being shatterproof. And because of the way they latched (or didn't) I am sure they were designed to be mounted horizontally instead of vertically. (The people who were renting the house before I bought it had little kids. Looking back, it's amazing no one was ever injured.) The original living room windows were just (badly) homemade double-pane units that had lst there seals. And they only opened at the top, so there was litle crossventilation in the room, which tends to turn into an oven on sunny days.

I have a standard rant about the house: I was told that it was built in 1974 "with his own hands" by a CU professor, and I am convinced he was a professor of something like English or American History, not anything like engineering or architecture. Every contractor I've ever had work on the house ends up saying "Why did they build it that way?" at some point.

The Lasting Impressions Guys are going to 'repair' the deck, which may turn out to require totally rebuilding it -- there's no way to tell until they start taking it apart. What I end up with should be a lot more functional and at least within shouting distance of code.

Thursday and today I took deliveries of stuff for the yard: a rainbarrel from Home Depot Online and a garden kit and tomato trellis kit from Squarefootgardening.com. The packages are still on the front porch (the box for the 60 gallon rain barrel is huge). I'll unpack them tomorrow and start preparing the places to install them. This will involve a trip to the local Home Depot or Lowes': I'm going to need a staple gun.

I also need the ingredients for the planting mix that goes into the square foot garden. Which happens to be the same mixture that Nanette uses for starting seedlings, so she was able to point me at sources for the ingredients.

Sunday afternoon, I have a strong college student (Shawn's son) coming over for a few hours to help with some yard work. So I'll be able to do some cleanup projects that need more strength than I have (the dead waterbed mattress will finally get put into the dumpster. Yay) , or more than two hands.

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Sat, Jul 18, 2009

Grapevine

Posted at 8:02 pm MDT to Garden

I own a grapevine. It is a seedless green variety from Ute Trail Greenhouse, one of the dealers at the farmers' market. It already has little grapes on it.

The place I want to put it doesn't quite exist yet: not until the next phase of landscape remodeling. But I wanted to be sure they did not sell out of the plants.

It should survive in its pot for a few more weeks provided I remember to water it. I'm leaving it on the porch near the front door so I will see it.

Since I am actually trying to start a garden, for the first time in years, I have added a Garden category to the blog. It seems odd to be starting a garden in late summer/early autumn, but according to the Square Foot Gardening website this is actually a good time to start. Germination times are supposed to be shorter in warm soil. And you don't need to worry about seedlings and starts getting frozen.

I'm going to be using square foot gardening techniques in parts of the garden I'm setting up, though not the part where the grapevine will be. I've got some of my garden books out, and this weekend I will be measuring and planning, so when Jason from New Creation Hardscapes comes on Monday to finish out the retainingwall project I will be able to gives him some specs to bid on the next phase.

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